Walking Into the Light

My mind has not been with dolls or in Berlin this week. I have just returned from a trip to Antwerp. I fell in love with this city some years ago when I had an exhibition there and am always glad to return. M HKA the contemporary art museum is always worth a visit, amazingly so on this occasion. On the ground floor we were treated to a spectacular overview of art from the 1960s and 70s showing the influence on European Art of the new movements coming out of the states. The exhibition Spirits of Internationalism, ends this weekend. All hung beautifully in the amazing spaces of this disused grain silo.

Then, on the second floor we were inspired by the retrospective of Belgian artist Chantel Ackerman “Too Far, Too Close”. It really made me think about how narratives can be created in film by using the medium spatially, spreading image across different types and sizes of screens, not relying on a prosaic, cinematic, single screen, device. A lot of artists and gallery curators are so unimaginative in their approach to showing video works.

Seeing the four spectacular Rubens paintings in the cathedral prompted a visit to his extraordinary house, extended from its Flemish heart into an extravagant Baroque Italian villa. Art super stars working for the “Yankee Dollar” are nothing new really. Neither of course is the practice of artists not making their own work, recently criticised so heavily by Mr Hockney. But I learnt several things during my visit to Rubens house that question our ideas about authorship.

1. Rubens was a court painter to Archduke Albrecht, as such it was his duty to make court portraits. Several copies would be made by the studio that could be ordered to be given as gifts to other monarchs or friends of the Archduke.

2. Rubens over painted older masters paintings with his own alterations to “improve” them.

3. Finally there was a painting made by two painters, one good at figures and landscape the other at still life, apparently a common practice at that time and a quick way to turn out paintings for the open market. It also enabled the buyer to get , well 2 for the price of 1.

Final inspiration came from the Musical Instrument Museum in Brussels, an extraordinary collection, still on the subject of 2 for 1, there was a spinet with a virginals fitted into the side.

Back home and back on track now, I got several books of German Romantic Painting out of the University Library yesterday and did a lot of thinking on the bus coming home. However I am not going to Berlin yet so I had better get on with some video editing now, inspired by Chantel Ackerman perhaps?

This is an image of Ampelman, those of you who have been to Berlin will know that this figure appears on the traffic lights in the old east when you are to “walk”. So, as walking forms the core of my proposal for my time in Berlin, the Ampelman seems an appropriate symbol for the project.

I am trying to keep an open mind about how work will develop while I am there. However I have been thinking about ways in which my research during the time in Berlin can relate to general themes within my work.

Thoughts at this moment involve researching the German Romantic movement and the invented landscapes of 18th Century Europe. The vast building projects of 19th and 20th Century Berlin and the huge empty expanses of that ravaged city give me the same kind of feeling as the unseeable sublime in the paintings of Kasper David Freidrick. It is all so big, evoking the sense of a greater power, leaving you vertiginous.

I want to revisit Freidrich the Greats fantasy summer palace and gardens Sanssouci at Potsdam. This place epitomises the 18th century romantic ideal. Whilst at first it seems difficult to make a link between the grandeur or German Romanticism and the tiny dolls I have been photographing in the studio, I feel that there are links. Their existence reflects a compelling need to attempt to make sense of the unimaginable vastness of a world full of difference and a desire to possess this. In a similar way the landscapers and architects of the 18th century created small ideal versions of the world full of the exotic, to be possessed and enjoyed by the aristocrats of Europe.

I was quite exited to discover the existence of a more contemporary invented landscape in the “Teufelsberg” or “Devils Mountain”. This is built out of rubble collected from the post war streets of West Berlin. I have since realised that this is where Anri Sala filmed one of his pieces that were shown at the Serpentine last year. The mountain is topped by an extraordinary structure that was a US listening post during the cold war. However my interest in the site is the mountain itself, a mountain that rises from the flat plain on which Berlin stands.

I would just like to be there now to experience all these things. But I have to help students to get through their degree show first.